Back in March, I wrote an article titled "Microsoft plays nice on the web, heading for Eclipse?" which discussed the interest the Microsoft is showing in Eclipse. I predicted that we will see a Silverlight development tool based on Eclipse that will be cross platform.
Seems like I was right. A new tool was released this week called eclipse4sl which is exactly an Eclipse based Silverlight tool. It is not cross-platform yet, but it will be. There's also a proposal for a new Eclipse sub-project called SLDT - Silverlight Development Tools. It's all funded and driven by Microsoft itself.
Another interesting anecdote is that the new tool also brings a C# editor into Eclipse. It's not the first attempt at such a tool, but this time it is supported by Microsoft itself. Are we going to see a competitor to Visual Studio for .Net development rising here? I don't think so. Visual Studio has a huge arsenal which will take years to replicate on the Eclipse side. Nevertheless, it's nice to have a choice. Especially when it's free.
